Tech

Forget chatbots. Google just told the world it’s done with the old “ask me a question, I’ll give you an answer” paradigm. At Google I/O 2026 on Tuesday, the company launched Gemini 3.5 Flash — a model that’s less interested in chatting with you and more interested in doing things for you. Alongside it came Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent deeply wired into Google’s ecosystem. This isn’t incremental. This is Google planting a flag: the future of AI isn’t conversation — it’s action. ...

The AI boom runs on memory chips. And the people who make those chips are about to walk off the job. On May 21, nearly 45,000 Samsung Electronics workers plan to begin an 18-day strike — the largest walkout in semiconductor history. Their target: the fabrication plants that produce the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips without which every Nvidia GPU, every AI data center, and every large language model is functionally dead weight. ...

Anthropic said Claude Mythos was too dangerous to release publicly. They shared it with 40 handpicked organizations. They committed $100 million to help patch the vulnerabilities it found. It leaked anyway. And now Google has confirmed the first known case of an AI-developed zero-day exploit being used by actual cybercriminals in the wild. The containment era lasted about six weeks. The Model That Finds What Humans Can’t Quick recap for anyone not tracking this saga: Claude Mythos Preview is Anthropic’s unreleased frontier model that autonomously discovers zero-day vulnerabilities — unknown flaws in software that developers haven’t patched because they didn’t know they existed. ...

OpenAI just crossed a line nobody can un-cross. On Friday, the company launched personal finance tools inside ChatGPT that let users connect their actual bank accounts, credit cards, and investment portfolios. The AI can now see your balances, transactions, spending habits, and debts — then serve up personalized financial advice based on your real numbers. It’s either the most useful AI feature ever shipped, or a privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Probably both. ...

The AI chip wars just got their first real plot twist in years. On Wednesday, Cerebras Systems — the company that builds processors the size of dinner plates — didn’t just go public. It detonated onto the Nasdaq. Shares priced at $185, opened at $350, peaked near $386, and settled at $311. That’s a 68% first-day pop, a $95 billion valuation, and the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Uber went public in 2019. ...

Your browser just got a lot smarter — and a lot nosier. Microsoft rolled out one of the most ambitious Edge updates in years on May 13, transforming Copilot from a chatbot sidebar into a memory-equipped, context-aware AI companion. It reads your tabs. It remembers your preferences across sessions. It clicks buttons and fills out forms on websites for you. The reaction has been swift and polarized. PCWorld called parts of it “replacing browser history with AI slop.” CNET flagged Microsoft’s own warning to “avoid using sensitive or personal information” with the agentic features. Meanwhile, early adopters on Reddit are raving about an AI that pulls up quarterly revenue figures from Power BI reports they viewed weeks ago — without opening a single tab. ...

There’s a moment in every technology shift when the old rules stop applying and nobody’s figured out the new ones yet. We just hit that moment — and it’s happening in cybersecurity. Over the past 48 hours, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model cracked Apple’s five-year, billion-dollar M5 security architecture in five days, sent U.S. banks scrambling to patch exposed systems, and drew a direct challenge from Microsoft’s own multi-agent cybersecurity platform. ...

When a pope speaks, 1.4 billion Catholics listen. When he speaks about artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons, the entire tech industry should be paying attention. On Thursday, Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope — delivered a sweeping condemnation of AI-powered warfare during a historic visit to Rome’s La Sapienza University. His words were sharp: investments in AI and high-tech weaponry are pushing humanity into a “spiral of annihilation.” ...

There’s a chart circulating in cybersecurity circles this week — the kind that makes seasoned professionals sit up straight and quietly close their laptop lids. The UK’s AI Security Institute just published data showing AI cyber capabilities have blown past every trend line they’ve drawn. The models aren’t just getting better at hacking. They’re getting better at hacking faster than we can measure. The Doubling Time That Keeps Shrinking AISI tracks “cyber time horizons” — how long and complex a cyberattack an AI can autonomously execute, benchmarked against human experts doing the same work. They’ve been fitting exponential curves to this data since late 2024. ...

Your bank is being patched at emergency speed right now, and you probably have no idea why. Anthropic’s Mythos — the AI model so dangerous it was never publicly released — is ripping through Wall Street’s cybersecurity posture like a chainsaw through wet paper. US banks are uncovering thousands of vulnerabilities they never knew existed. Japan’s three largest banks just got access. And the cybersecurity community is arguing about whether any of this is actually new. ...